By: Michelle Kirby

A 2010 law established a pilot program to allow Connecticut courts to order GPS devices (ankle bracelets) to be used to track family violence offenders. Under this law, the Judicial Branch’s Court Support Services Division (CSSD) implemented the Alert Notification/GPS program in the Bridgeport, Danielson, and Hartford judicial districts. CSSD’s preliminary report on the program indicated that it met its objective to (1) enhance monitoring of high-risk family violence offenders and (2) increase victim safety. The December 2011 final summary report concluded that the program was successfully implemented in all three court locations with a high degree of collaboration systemwide.

Hartford: Connecticut General Assembly Office of Legislative Research, 2023. 4p.

By  Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin

This Article examines the effect of state laws restricting the use of police quotas. Police quotas describe the establishment of a predetermined number of traffic stops, citations, or arrests that officers must make within a particular time period. Some police supervisors have historically used quotas to ensure adequate productivity by officers. However, critics argue that quotas incentivize officers to engage in unnecessary, and in some cases, unconstitutional, coercive behavior. Numerous states across the country have enacted laws banning or limiting the use of police quotas.

This Article analyzes a dataset of traffic and pedestrian stops from eleven law enforcement agencies with varied laws on police quotas over time. It finds minimal evidence that laws limiting police quotas reduce coercive behavior by police. If anything, agencies may engage in slightly more coercive behavior after the introduction of these laws. However, we find evidence that restrictions on the use of police quotas may improve the quality of traffic stops and vehicle searches.

We offer several hypotheses to explain these results. First, the narrow focus of quota laws may limit their effectiveness. Second, the managerial tactics that replace police quotas may incentivize officers to engage in similar amounts of coercive behavior. And third, the relatively weak enforcement mechanisms in state quota bans may reduce their deterrent effect.

We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the literature on police regulation. We also offer recommendations for reforming police quota laws.

109 Iowa Law Review 2127 (2024), 

By Zoë Robinson and Stephen Rushin

The law enforcement lobby represents one of the most important and undertheorized barriers to criminal justice reform. We define the law enforcement lobby as the constellation of entrenched actors within the justice system—particularly police unions, correctional officer unions, and prosecutor associations—that exert an outsized role in policy development. The law enforcement lobby operates largely without coordinated opposition, resulting in capture of criminal justice policymaking and skewed policy outcomes that often institutionalize injustice and subordination. The strength of the law enforcement lobby also presents a challenge to the growing defunding and abolition movements. Nevertheless, the law enforcement lobby remains at the periphery of contemporary scholarly conversations about the democratization and design of criminal justice institutions.

This Article describes and evaluates the influence of the law enforcement lobby on criminal justice policy. It argues that the law enforcement lobby raises unique problems that extend beyond traditional lobbying concerns, including the ability to influence life and liberty, the power to perpetuate racial subordination, and a pervasive power over the operation of democratic institutions.

Drawing on the growing calls for democratization and power-shifting in the criminal justice system, this Article offers a range of recommendations to curtail the strength of the law enforcement lobby. First, the Article argues for reforms that “level up” of the power of competing interests that can counter the power of the law enforcement lobby in criminal justice policymaking. In doing so, the Article focuses specifically on reforms that imbed contestation in policymaking by communities most impacted by the criminal justice system. Second, the Article concurrently proposes mechanisms to “level down” the power of the law enforcement lobby, including realistic restrictions on the lobbying capacity of law enforcement interest groups that draws on First Amendment Speech Clause doctrine that permits restriction of public employee speech. Taken together, these reforms could facilitate broader transformation of the American criminal justice system.

107 Minnesota Law Review 1965 (2023), 73p.

By Barry Friedman, Rachel Harmon & Farhang Heydari

For far too long, the federal government has failed to exercise its constitutional authority to mitigate the harms imposed by local policing. Absent federal intervention, though, some harmful aspects of policing will not be addressed effectively, or at all. States and localities often lack the necessary capacity and expertise to change policing, and many states and localities lack the will. This Article argues for federal intervention and describes what that intervention should look like. The Article begins by describing three paradigmatic areas of local policing that require federal intervention to create real change: excessive use of force, racial discrimination, and the unregulated use of surveillance technologies. Because state and local governments are either unable or unwilling to address these problems alone, the federal government should intervene to identify and enforce minimum standards, develop best practices, collect data, and distribute resources nationwide. Regrettably, Congress has failed to act adequately to improve local policing for the better, although it has tried to encourage reform through the use of its Spending Power. This Article argues that Congress should utilize its regulatory powers under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause to address these paradigmatic problem areas, and it explains how this can be done consistently with Supreme Court doctrine. Alongside—or in the absence of—congressional action, the executive branch has the power and responsibility to act to address policing’s harms. The Article explains that, though indirect, the President wields considerable power to influence policing by setting policy, implementing federal programs, enforcing civil rights, and supervising federal law enforcement. Although the executive branch should use this power to promote local policing that is effective, fair, and accountable, and that minimizes harm, administration after administration has failed to do so consistently and also has failed to hold federal law enforcement to these standards. Recent executive branch efforts have improved the situation, but there still exists a gaping chasm between how the federal government should be influencing local policing and how it is doing so today

109 Virginia Law Review 1527 (December, 2023), 101p.

By Anne McNamara

During the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio crafted the policing power to stop and search an individual without a warrant, without probable cause, and if the officer possesses a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Thirty years later, in Whren v. United States, the Court willfully blinded itself to the subjective motivations of an officer who initiate a Terry stop, requiring only a claim of some lawful reason to initiate a stop to adhere to the Fourth Amendments protections. Despite overwhelming evidence that the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence disparately affects Black people, the Court continuously asserts that the Equal Protection Clause (EPC)—not the Fourth Amendment—is the proper constitutional avenue for relief from race-motivated policing. Even a defendant who successfully overcomes the EPC’s practically insurmountable requirement of proving discriminatory intent is not afforded the exclusionary rule’s protection. Ultimately, the Court’s use of EPC as its suggested remedy provides little concrete relief for individuals subjected to pretextual stops. Against this backdrop of racially influenced law enforcement, the advent and development of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has fundamentally altered American policing over the past decade. FRT is an algorithmic code, created by private companies, capable of recognizing a person’s facial identity by comparing it to other faces that are located in a centralized database. Some critics of the police’s use of FRT warn of its disparate impact on people of color who already face higher instances of police surveillance. Further, critics caution that FRT algorithms have higher error rates in identifying people of color, that databases used are often overly saturated with people of color, and that the police’s unregulated, unrestrained use of FRT reinforces preconceived notions of “Black criminality.” Historically, federal courts have been reluctant to condemn police implementation of technological advances as violative of the Fourth Amendment. While the police are prohibited from using publicly unavailable technology to surveil the details of an individual’s home, technology deployed by law enforcement in a public space often escapes constitutional constraints. In some instances, however, defendants successfully challenge police use of advanced technology for surveillance purposes through the lens of mosaic theory, which assesses police behavior in the aggregate to determine whether prolonged periods of surveillance constitutes an invasion of privacy impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. In light of the Court’s silence regarding FRT, a handful of cities and states have enacted laws that curb or completely ban police use of FRT. On the federal level, the preceding Congress proposed two bills: one seeking to require probable cause for police to deploy the technology, the other seeking to implement a complete federal ban of FRT and to disincentivize state and local use by withholding certain funding. This Note first surveys the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that created a legal justice system that is willfully ignorant of an officer’s potential racial motivations.18 Then, this Note discusses the police’s implementation of FRT and how it further infringes upon Black people’s liberties and dignities under the guise of “neutral” technology. Next, this Note explores the Court’s reasoning in evolving technology and surveillances cases—with a particular emphasis on mosaic theory—and discusses state and proposed federal statutory approaches to FRT regulation. Then, this Note argues that the most dangerous uses of FRT are the least likely to be recognized and curbed by the Supreme Court due to its longstanding refusal to allow the constitution to check unrestrained police behavior, leaving Black people defenseless against FRT’s role in increasing the structural inequalities embedded in our legal system. This Note concludes by calling for a comprehensive federal ban on police use of FRT that adequately incentivizes state and local law enforcement to enact similar bans.

SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. LVI:731 , 26p.

B/y Griffin Edwards and

Stephen Rushin

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. But some scholars and civil rights activists worried that by giving police officers wider discretion to search vehicles incident to arrest, the Belton rule may have led to unjustified civil rights violations and racial profiling.

This Article argues that, by limiting vehicle searches incident to arrest, Gant may have disincentivized policing tactics that disproportionately target individuals of color without jeopardizing officer safety.

By utilizing a data set of traffic stops from thirteen law enforcement agencies in seven states, this Article presents an empirical study of the effects of shifting doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest. This Article makes two findings. First, it finds no evidence that Gant endangered officer safety. Changes in state doctrines related to vehicle searches incident to arrest are not associated with increases in assaults of officers during traffic stops. Second, it hypothesizes that Gant may have reduced racial profiling. Gant may be linked to a somewhat larger decline in vehicle searches incident to arrest for nonwhite individuals relative to white individuals.

These findings are a reminder that seemingly neutral procedural choices by courts in regulating police behavior may have racially disparate effects. We conclude by arguing for the narrowing of the discretionary authority of police officers as a mechanism for reducing disparities in the criminal justice system.

91 Fordham L. Rev. 1 (2022).

By Brian A. Jackson, Pauline Moore, Jennifer T. Leschitz, Benjamin Boudreaux, Jo Caulkins, Shoshana R. Shelton

Violence by K–12 students is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent such incidents is becoming increasingly important. Various concerning behaviors or disturbing communications, including direct threats, can precede acts of violence. Although removing every student exhibiting such behaviors might seem prudent, doing so can be counterproductive, limiting the effectiveness of safety efforts. With effective systems for behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM), schools can assess and respond to concerning behavior to protect the community and respond to the student whose behavior caused concern.

To do so, schools need the tools to respond. Tools may include restrictive measures or law enforcement involvement in the most serious cases, but other options can be more effective. Those additional options include different types of mental health intervention, counseling, and other supports. Teams with extensive tools available to them can better customize interventions, increasing the chance of positive outcomes for all involved.

In this report, the authors draw on published literature and extensive interviews with education and public safety practitioners to build an inventory of the many intervention options that are valuable for schools in the management phase of BTAM. In addition, drawing on varied approaches from the fields of counseling, school discipline and behavioral management, and other professions that must match appropriate services to the needs of youth in their care, the report discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement this critical part of efforts in preventing targeted violence and keeping school communities safe.

Key Findings

Various Intervention Options Are Available for K–12 BTAM Efforts

Support-focused interventions can address the underlying causes of problematic student behavior and also lead a student toward a more favorable, positive path into the future.

By using supportive counseling and other interventions, BTAM is widening the options available for school leaders and staff to address problematic behavior that has the potential to develop into violence.

To be effective, school BTAM teams need a broad set of tools, including options appropriately matched (1) to the specifics of a student's problematic behaviors, (2) to the unique school community and environment, and (3) to the needs and circumstances of the student or students involved.

Insights from Education, Public Safety, and Other Fields Can Be Combined to Support Matching Effective Interventions to Student Needs

Decision support tools and resource-matching guidance can help ensure that school-based teams are collecting the information required to taking a holistic approach to address a student's varied needs and help promote appropriate consistency to ensure that disparities in how BTAM teams respond do not substantiate concerns that BTAM processes are unfair or inequitable.

Using structured systems to capture data when a BTAM team (1) interviews students involved in an incident, (2) collects school or law enforcement data, or (3) contacts others for information about a student of concern provides a more straightforward starting point for selecting among multiple intervention options.

Recommendations

To better inform intervention planning, intervention tools should be designed so that they prioritize collecting data on factors that can be changed because pieces of information in BTAM that may be a useful part of assessing the danger posed by an individual may be useless for intervention planning.

The inventory of intervention options developed in this study could provide a starting point for schools to make conscious decisions as they (1) review the options available to their teams and (2) identify any options they do not have access to but that could become valuable near-term priorities to strengthen their school safety efforts.

Progress monitoring data of BTAM efforts can help better support students while also helping schools become more responsive to external oversight of their BTAM programs and allay concerns about the fairness and equity of outcomes across different student populations.

Including positive mileposts into threat management planning not only could help lay out a path to full completion of all intervention activities but could also help define goals more specifically for an at-risk student, motivating even more beneficial outcomes.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2025. 170p.

By David J. Knight and Vesla M. Weaver

This review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2025. 8:25–52

By Stephen Rushin

This Article argues that, if effectively regulated, policing represents a fundamentally important social institution that advances the community interest in public safety, justice, equality, and the rule of law.

In recent years, a significant and growing body of legal scholarship has called for the shrinking of police responsibilities, the defunding of police budgets, or the complete abolition of local police departments. A countervailing body of scholarly literature has questioned the wisdom of some of these proposals, arguing that they could unintentionally make policing worse or have unintended public safety effects.

This Article enters this debate by affirmatively defending the importance of the institution of policing. It argues that effectively regulated policing is critical to the investigation of harmful criminal behavior, the responses to public safety emergencies, the deterrence of future harmful conduct, the physical protection of historically marginalized communities, and the rule of law.

However, policing can only serve these important functions if it is effectively regulated and accountable to the community it serves. Too often, the failure of policymakers to properly regulate police behavior has led to unaccountable policing agencies that regularly violate the constitutional rights of their constituents, particularly the rights of historically marginalized populations. However, that represents an ongoing regulatory challenge rather than an indictment of the fundamental importance of the institution of policing.

Understanding the importance of policing as a social institution has more than mere academic significance. As some scholars push for a fundamental reimagination of public safety, it is vital for these proposals to understand the value conferred by the institution of policing. Only by understanding the importance of policing can both abolitionists and reformers develop solutions that balance public safety and the protection of constitutional rights.

76 South Carolina Law Review 133 (2024), 47p.

By Jeannine Bell and Stephen Rushin

This Article considers how policymakers can more effectively constrain police authority during traffic stops to reduce racial disparities and prevent unnecessary violence.

We begin by chronicling the power granted to police officers during traffic enforcement and the harms generated by this discretionary power. Under existing criminal procedure, police officers have considerable authority to stop motorists for any technical violation of the traffic code, even if the stated justification is a pretext for investigating an unrelated hunch or suspicion. After stopping a motorist, existing doctrine gives police the ability to question motorists, search vehicles under numerous circumstances, arrest drivers for minor violations of the law, and otherwise use traffic stops as a justification for criminal fishing expeditions. This makes police traffic stops an entryway into officer misconduct and violence.

Moreover, the harms of police traffic enforcement are felt disproportionately by communities of color. Empirical evidence generally suggests that Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely than their white counterparts to experience traffic stops. Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be stopped during daylight hours relative to nighttime hours when their race is apparent to police through visual observation. And searches of Black and Hispanic motorists are less likely to produce contraband than searches of white drivers, suggesting that police may employ a less rigorous standard of probable cause when justifying vehicle searches of drivers of color.

Given the growing body of literature on the harms caused by police traffic enforcement, some have called for the abolition of police traffic enforcement. Short of abolition, though, this Article shows how jurisdictions across the country have already moved to limit the authority of police during traffic encounters. This approach does not seek to eliminate entirely the police from the enforcement of traffic laws. Rather, it involves state and local policymakers enacting restrictions on police power during traffic enforcement that go beyond those mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court under existing doctrine. Indeed, in recent years, states and municipalities have enacted limitations on the use of pretextual traffic stops, consent searches, and unrelated questioning of motorists after stops. Others have restricted or banned the use of quotas as a police management tool. Some prosecutors’ offices have announced declination policies designed to disincentivize police from using traffic stops as a tool for the investigation of other unrelated crimes. Still other jurisdictions have explored additional reporting requirements and even technological replacements for the use of police officers in the enforcement of the traffic code.

Combined, we argue that this sort of criminal justice minimalism can reduce the harmful and racially disparate effects of police traffic enforcement without compromising public safety

57 Arizona State Law Journal, 2025, 52p.

By The College of Policing (UK)

The government’s Safer Streets mission aims to reduce serious harm and increase public confidence in policing and the wider criminal justice system. This guide supports senior police leaders and police and crime commissioners to help achieve this mission. It clearly sets out the best available evidence on public confidence in the police, as well as the policing activities that are most likely to have an impact. „ Implementing neighbourhood policing – Having a targeted visible presence in crime and anti-social behaviour hot spots or places with low trust. – Community engagement to identify the crime and anti-social behaviour issues that matter to people locally. – Carrying out effective problem-solving to tackle the issues that matter the most to local people. „ Policing with procedural and distributive justice – Making fair decisions and treating people respectfully. – Not being seen to over-police and under-protect communities. „ Improving police contact with victims – Responding to the needs and concerns of victims. – Focusing as much on the process as the end result. „ Improving police contact with suspects – Minimising the number of negative experiences. – Explaining enforcement action and preserving people’s dignity. „ Tackling police wrongdoing – Working within the law and adhering to ethical and professional standards. The guide begins by providing key definitions and trends in public perceptions over the past 20 years. It ends with a summary of what else may be important to public confidence in the police.

Coventry, UK: College of Policing Limited (2025) 23p.

By

Sarah Charman

,

Jemma Tyson

Record numbers of police officers are voluntarily resigning in England and Wales yet there is a lack of research which analyses why. Findings from an analysis of 62 interviews with police leavers who voluntarily resigned from the police service within England and Wales between January 2021 and June 2022 suggest that officers are leaving primarily due to perceptions of organizational injustice which focus upon: a lack of voice; concerns about promotion/progression; poor leadership; and a lack of organizational flexibility. This paper takes this latter reason—organizational flexibility—as its focus and through an inductive analysis of these leavers’ voices, aims to both enrich the scarce qualitative academic literature on police workforce resignations and retention but also to offer significant evidence for future consideration of workforce optimization. The findings indicate that although sympathetic to operational policing complexities, participants were frustrated by organizational inflexibility. Three key areas were identified where the police service was perceived to be unsupportive or unreceptive—(a) dealing with additional needs, disabilities, or health issues of officers, (b) conflicts with non-work commitments, primarily those associated with childcare/parental responsibilities, and (c) supporting officers transitioning to part-time working. These structural barriers to effective workplace functioning were exacerbated by the cultural norms of overwork and ‘fitting in’ and were additionally particularly experienced by female resigners. The authors call for a challenge to the cultural barriers towards flexible working, the modelling of flexible working at all levels of the organization, and a focus on reciprocal flexibility between employer and employee. Until this issue can be tackled, it is argued that retention will continue to be an underestimated but significant site of inequality within policing.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, paad104,

By Jacqueline M Drew, Elise Sargeant, Sherri Martin

Policing worldwide is facing a staffing and retention crisis. If the staffing exodus continues, communities will be left with too few police and large cohorts of inexperienced new recruits on the job. Drawing on 2,669 survey responses collected as part of a national study of law enforcement officers across the USA, we test an integrated theoretical model of the predictors of turnover intentions. We computed a path model using structural equation modelling, finding that job demand stressors (including trauma, organizational, and operational stressors), burnout, psychological distress, and commitment (including organizational commitment and occupational commitment) all play important roles in explaining the intentions of officers to exit the policing profession. Based on the study findings, the importance of trauma, organizational and operational job demand stress, and the differential impact of organizational and occupational commitment on police turnover intentions is established. Addressing burnout and psychological distress through a wellness agenda is likely to assist in stemming the outflow of officers from policing. The current study makes a significant empirical and practical contribution to the small body of existing police turnover research. The current research guides police leaders on the critical factors that must be considered when developing strategies and initiatives that aim to positively impact on the retention of officers within policing.

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 18, 2024, paae036,

By The United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Offices Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Louisiana

On the evening of May 10, 2019, near Monroe, Louisiana, a Louisiana State Police trooper tried to stop a 49-year-old Black man named Ronald Greene for speeding and running a red light. Mr. Greene drove away. For 14 minutes, officers pursued him until he lost control of his vehicle, crashing on the side of the road. According to a sergeant that LSP regarded as its in-house use-of-force expert, what happened in the ensuing hours, weeks, and months was a “catastrophic failure in a million different directions.” Multiple LSP troopers and sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene of the crash. They tased Mr. Greene repeatedly and pulled him out of his car. They punched him, dragged him by ankle shackles, and left him face down in the road. When Mr. Greene tried to roll onto his side, a trooper put his foot on Mr. Greene’s buttocks to hold him down on his stomach. That trooper later told a supervisor, “I’m trying to keep him laying down. I was going to sit him up, but I don’t want him spitting blood all over us.” Mr. Greene pleaded, “I’m scared. I’m your brother. I’m scared.” The LSP troopers deactivated or muted their body-worn cameras. When a supervisor arrived, he casually stepped over Mr. Greene, who laid moaning on the ground, and instead asked the troopers if they were ok. None of the troopers rendered aid to Mr. Greene, who became unresponsive and died before he reached the hospital. After Mr. Greene died, troopers filed reports attributing his death to a car accident. “We investigate crashes every day,” one trooper later told us. “No way someone died from a car crash with that damage.” One trooper who was there misdated the incident in an official report. LSP’s designated use-of-force expert at the time believed that was a deliberate attempt to cover up the incident. Another trooper miscategorized camera footage in LSP’s systems. And the supervisor who stepped over Mr. Greene’s body that night signed off on all the use-of-force reports. Over 15 months passed before LSP opened an Internal Affairs investigation into Mr. Greene’s death. In the intervening days and months, LSP troopers—including one involved in Mr. Greene’s death—would go on to assault more drivers. It was not until September 2020, 16 months after the incident, that LSP fired one of the troopers involved. It would take until 2021 for LSP to suspend a second trooper and fire a third who was involved in both Mr. Greene’s death and an assault of a different Black man. Mr. Greene’s death and its aftermath demonstrated serious failures at LSP—excessive force, improper supervision, ineffective training, and breakdowns in accountability. As our civil pattern or practice investigation revealed, these failures were not isolated, but part of a larger pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that deprives people in Louisiana of their rights under the Constitution.

Following a comprehensive investigation, the Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the Louisiana State Police engage in a statewide pattern or practice of using excessive force, which violates the Fourth Amendment. Our investigation, opened in 2022, also included examining whether LSP engages in racially discriminatory policing. At this time, we make findings only as to excessive force. Though this investigation reveals systemic problems, we recognize that most LSP troopers work hard to keep the public safe. We commend LSP troopers and staff who devote their professional lives to serving the community. LSP began making much-needed reforms after video of Mr. Greene’s death became public in 2021, two years after the incident. We believe those changes may have contributed to some recent improvements in use-of-force practices. The changes include revising LSP’s use-of-force policy, creating a Force Investigation Unit to investigate serious uses of force, and updating training programs. However, more reforms are needed to remedy the unlawful conduct we found. We describe recommended changes at the end of this report. We hope to work constructively with the State and LSP to implement these reforms.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 2025. 32p.

By Jillian Long

Incidents of police-involved shootings resulting in the death of unarmed civilians, such as Andre Hill in 2020, Bijan Ghaisar in 2017, and Michael Brown in 2014, have raised concerns about law enforcement use of deadly force, particularly involving firearms. In light of these concerns, growing attention has been paid to less-than-lethal weapons (LLWs) and the role LLWs may play in providing law enforcement officers alternatives to the use of deadly force.

A multitude of weapons marketed as less-than-lethal alternatives to firearms are currently in use by federal, state, and local law enforcement, including batons, pepper sprays, and stun guns. There are also a number of LLWs in development, such as unmanned aircraft systems (drones) equipped with tear gas, rubber bullets, and TASERs.

Some observers contend that LLWs offer the possibility of minimizing risk of death and serious injury to citizens and officers while simultaneously providing law enforcement with effective tools to incapacitate violent or noncompliant persons. Nevertheless, there is evidence that LLWs may present a number of potential health risks, lending credence to arguments that LLWs are less-than-lethal in name, but, depending on the circumstances of their use, can be lethal in practice. For example, a team of journalists led by the Associated Press, in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University, documented over 1,000 deaths that followed local and state police officers’ use of less-than-lethal force from 2012 to 2021. Similarly, a 2019 Reuters investigation of deaths related to law enforcement use of TASERs found that 1,081 individuals had died after being hit by a police TASER from 1983 to 2017.

Should policymakers consider examining ways to legislate on the use of LLWs, numerous issues may garner attention. Currently, there is no single, universally accepted definition of less-than-lethal weapon, and the use of the term varies greatly among U.S. federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Conceptualizing a definition for LLWs raises a number of questions, including whether LLWs should be defined

• under a label other than less-than-lethal,

• according to a common capability,

• according to a common operational utility,

• according to an intended use to minimize risk of death and permanent injury, or

• according to a common application.

Policymakers could consider whether it is beneficial to establish a statutory definition of less-than-lethal weapon. Codifying the meaning of LLWs could be useful in terms of clarifying what weapons are (and are not) classified as less-than-lethal, which may help sharpen the focus and potential efficacy of policies. On the other hand, some may argue that law enforcement agencies and departments are better suited to define LLWs and, thereby, address LLWs in their individualized use-of-force policies, based on their organization’s specific needs, duties, and circumstances.

Moreover, there are relatively little federal data available on law enforcement officers’ use of LLWs and, consequently, few studies analyzing the health effects caused by law enforcement’s use of such weapons. Policymakers may wish to direct a federal agency or department to conduct research into LLW injury and mortality. Based on these findings, policymakers could consider legislative actions to influence law enforcement use of LLWs, such as (1) passing a bill encouraging or limiting federal law enforcement officers’ usage of LLWs and (2) placing provisions on or withholding funding from existing federal grant programs to incentivize or discourage state and local law enforcement usage of LLWs.

R48365

Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 23, 2025I

27p.

By Mylan Denerstein

This is the Monitor’s 23rd report and second report focused on the compliance of the New York City Police Department’s (the “Department” or “NYPD”) Neighborhood Safety Teams (“NST”) and Public Safety Teams (“PST”) with constitutional requirements in executing stops, frisks, and searches. In March 2021, the NYPD initiated NST units in certain precincts to combat gun violence in high-crime areas. Officers in NST units engage in proactive stop, frisks, and searches, and generally they are not expected to respond to 911 calls-for-service. NST officers drive unmarked cars and wear uniforms distinct from those worn by NYPD patrol officers. In June 2023, the Monitor filed the Nineteenth Report of the Independent Monitor (the “19th Report”) with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which contained results of the Monitor team’s 2022 audit of the NSTs. That report concluded that NST officers performed substantially below constitutional standards and had a rate of unlawful Terry stops nine percentage points higher than their counterparts in regular patrol positions. In addition, the report concluded that supervisors in the Department failed to identify and remediate unlawful reported stops. To determine Fourth Amendment compliance with the stops, frisks, and searches conducted by NSTs since the filing of the 19th Report, the Monitor began a second, more comprehensive audit of NSTs and PSTs, another specialized proactive enforcement unit, to assess their compliance with court-ordered reforms. This follow-up report audits NST, PST, and regular patrol officers based on stops, frisks, and searches conducted in 2023. It compares NST officers with their counterparts on regular patrol and in PSTs and measures compliance rates of all supervisors and officers regardless of unit assignment. Based on the 2023 audit, the Report concludes that NST and PST officers are not performing stops, frisks, and searches at constitutional levels, and that supervisors of NST, PST, and patrol officers are not appropriately overseeing their officers. Some of the key findings are below: • This 2023 audit shows that NST officers’ constitutional compliance with respect to stops, frisks, and searches did not improve since the Monitor’s 2022 audit. • In the 2023 audit, NST officers had reasonable suspicion (and thus a lawful basis) for 75% of the reported Terry stops, slightly below the NST percentage of 76% compliance in the 2022 audit. • In the 2023 audit, NST officers made lawful stops at a rate of 75%, 17 percentage points lower than their patrol counterparts’ rate of 92%. • In the 2023 audit, PST officers also made lawful stops at a rate lower than patrol officers, with only 64% of their reported stops being assessed as lawful, which is 28 percentage points lower than their patrol counterparts’ rate of 92%. • In the 2023 audit, NST officers and PST officers overwhelmingly conducted self-initiated stops (70% and 77%, respectively, were self-initiated), while officers on routine patrol primarily conducted stops based on radio runs (68% were radio runs). • In the 2023 audit, regardless of the officer’s unit assignment (NST, PST, Patrol, or other), Terry stops based on a complainant/witness (100% lawful) or a radio run (94% lawful) were nearly all constitutional, while only 65% of self-initiated stops were assessed as lawful. • In the 2023 audit, NST officers had reasonable suspicion for only 58% of the frisks assessed and had a legal basis for only 54% of the searches assessed. • In the 2023 audit, despite significant numbers of unlawful stops, frisks, and searches, command-level supervisors of NST, PST, and Patrol officers only determined that 1% of stops were unlawful and 1% of frisks and searches were unlawful. • In 95% of the stop reports in this audit in which race was identified (N=385) and 93% of the BWC videos assessed (N=697), the person stopped was identified as Black or Hispanic. Of the 397 stop reports in which gender was indicated, 97% were male. Overall, in this audit, 89% of the individuals encountered were Black or Hispanic males. The NYPD must focus on supervisors ensuring implementation of constitutionally compliant stops, frisks, and searches. The Department must improve Fourth Amendment compliance levels and NST and PST units must be better supervised. The ball is in the Department’s hands, and the NYPD can do this. The law requires no less.

New York: New York Police Department Monitor, 2025. 51p.

By Europol. Strategic Group on Technology and Ethics 

Europol was mandated in 2019 by the EU Justice and Home Affairs ministers to create an Innovation Lab to support the law enforcement community in the area of innovation. The Lab aims to identify, promote and develop concrete innovative solutions in support of the EU Member States’ operational work. These will help investigators and analysts to make the most of the opportunities offered by new technology to avoid duplication of work, create synergies and pool resources. The activities of the Lab are directly linked to the strategic priorities as laid out in Europol Strategy 2020+, which states that Europol shall be at the forefront of law enforcement innovation and research. The European Clearing Board for ‘Tools, Methods and Innovations in the field of technical support of operations and investigations’ (EuCB) was launched by the Heads of Europol National Units (HENUs) in their meeting of 5 November 2020. It is composed of Single Points of Contact (SPoCs) from the Europol Innovation Lab, all EU Member States and the four Schengen-associated countries. SPoCs meet regularly in plenary meetings, during which they update each other on innovative projects and tools and decide on new joint collaboration activities. The Strategic Group on Technology and Ethics was founded in 2021 under the umbrella of the EuCB. Currently, the group is composed of representatives from Australia, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. One of the objectives of the group has been to create these guidelines ‘Assessing technology in law enforcement: A method for ethical decision-making’ for the benefit of all EuCB members. A method for applying ethics in practical decision-making Digital transformation and technology are vitally important in enhancing order and security but may also pose a threat to fundamental rights and freedoms. This document presents a method for assessing novel technology from a perspective of widely accepted values and principles. The guidelines contain a description of the central values and ethical principles, and give examples in the form of use cases, illustrating how they may be applied in structured decision-making and evaluation, in situations involving new technology in law enforcement. The use cases show how the method can be helpful in forming transparent and understandable arguments for trustworthy decisions about the adoption and use of various types of technology in law enforcement. The values and principles discussed here are also valuable when cooperating European law enforcement authorities are in search of common moral ground in their respective practices. The work of the Strategic Group on Technology and Ethics is based on methods used in clinical ethics committees and insights from value-based practices in policing – in addition to studies of ethical guidelines for technology and a survey of values central to European law enforcement authorities. Part I of the guidelines explains the seven steps of the method, while Part II sets out use cases to illustrate the application of the method in practice. Precautions regarding the use cases It should be noted that the use cases in Part II have not been legally vetted. They serve to illustrate the present method, and although the conclusion of a use case may be that it is ethical to use the technology (under certain conditions), this should NOT be understood as a conclusion concerning its legality. Legal regulation of law enforcement’s use of technology exists on many levels, both nationally and internationally, and it is beyond the mandate and resources of the Strategic Group on Technology and Ethics to perform a legal assessment of each use case scenario. It is a virtue of the present guidelines that they provide for transparency concerning the principles and values taken into consideration by the decision-maker, and ensure that the making of a decision is specific with respect to local, political, social, cultural and economic contexts, and the technology in question. This also implies that the use cases will never merely be copied to a domestic setting. While they may provide guidance and inspiration, the decision-maker is always responsible for producing an original assessment that takes account of the concrete circumstances in the actual situation. Ethics and the law To the members of Europol, it is fundamental that any development and deployment of technology in law enforcement must be lawful. For the purpose of these guidelines, it is thus assumed that, in a concrete case, issues of legality have already been duly addressed according to appropriate procedures. In the field of new technologies in law enforcement, however, the law may sometimes lag behind, leaving grey areas that are open for interpretation. A structured ethical approach, as presented in these guidelines, may shed light on the values and principles involved, and suggest which interpretation is ethically defendable. In the same vein, the present value-based reflective method may play a constructive role in the legislative process, by making visible – and more understandable – the ethical concerns that legislators should take into account when striking the balance between freedom and security in the field of law enforcement. Law enforcement’s development and/or use of new technology also regularly raises issues related to fundamental rights, where law and ethics are closely intertwined and the lines between the two may become blurred. This, too, leaves space for the present method to contribute with new perspectives and enrich our understanding of the issues at stake. A ‘living’ document The intention is to make this a ‘living’ document, that is, a document that captures new technology as well as novel applications of technology already in use. This is provided for by the expansion over time of the collection of use cases, which may integrate further developments in this area on European and national levels. This should also be reflected in Initiatives for training in the use of the method. By its dynamic character the document aims to be a durable resource for law enforcement authorities and policy makers.

Europol 2025. 30p.

By Gregory D. Breetzke and Luna Asefaw Girmay

Research examining the crime drop has become increasingly popular with a plethora of studies showing how crime has declined since the 1990s. The vast majority of this research has, however, emanated from the United States and other ‘Western’ countries. In this study, we undertook a national-level analysis of crime trends in South Africa from 2010 to 2019 using official police data. Results showed that crime did drop marginally in the country over the study period although there is substantial variability in crime decline by crime type and geography. Moreover, various socio-demographic characteristics, such as income inequality, were found to possibly influence the temporal trends of crime in the country observed. These findings underscore the importance of context-specific analyses in understanding decadal crime trends and highlight the need for targeted, geographically nuanced approaches to crime prevention in South Africa

Security Journal (2025) 38:14

By Susan Olzak

An underlying premise of democratic politics is that protest can be an effective form of civic engagement that shapes policy changes desired by marginalized groups. But it is not certain that this premise holds up under scrutiny. This paper presents a three-part argument that protest (a) signals the salience of a movements’ focal issue and expands awareness that an issue is a social problem requiring a solution, (b) empowers residents in disadvantaged communities and raises a sense of community cohesion, which together (c) raise costs and exert pressure on elites to make concessions. The empirical analysis examines the likelihood that a city will establish a Civilian Review Board (CRB). It then compares the effects of protest and CRB presence on counts of officer-involved fatalities by race and ethnicity. Two main conjectures about the effect of protest are supported: Cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites). But the establishment of CRBs does not reduce fatalities, as some have hoped. Nonetheless, mobilizing against police brutality matters, even in the absence of civilian review boards.

Forthcoming. “Does Protest Against Police Violence Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1980-2019.” American Sociological Review., 83 p.

By Rylan Simpson ,Leigh Grossman

Purpose

Longstanding debates in policing regard the optimal method of patrolling the community. One question that often gets raised is if patrol officers should be deployed in single-crewed (i.e., one-officer) or double-crewed (i.e., two-officer) units? As part of the present research, we empirically examine the call-related output of patrol units by crewed status in Oakland, California.

Methods

Drawing upon calls for service data from the Oakland Police Department, we retrospectively reconstructed the patrol environment to assess the call-related output of single- versus double-crewed units. We also explored potential variation in the output of double-crewed units as a function of pairing characteristics (e.g., regularly partnered versus not regularly partnered).

Results

Our results revealed that single- and double-crewed units handled similar numbers of calls for service, although sometimes of potentially different types, in similar amounts of time. Our results also revealed that the output of double-crewed units was similar regardless of the pairing characteristics examined.

Conclusions

Whereas many police agencies deploy their patrol officers in single-crewed units, other police agencies deploy their patrol officers in double-crewed units. Overall, we find limited variation among the output of patrol units by crewed status. We discuss our results in the context of research and practice.

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 94, September–October 2024, 8 p.